Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Orson Welles' last, unfinished film

I heard somewhere that Orson Welles' last, unfinished feature, The Other Side of the Wind, was locked in a vault somewhere in Iran. He apparently got funding from pre-revolutionary Iranian sources. But, no, the 1,083 reels of film were sitting in a French film lab all this time. The film is now being completed and will reportedly be released on Netflix.

How many movies do film labs have lying around? Someone found out that Ed Wood never had the money to get one of his films back from the lab, so they went and paid the charges and released the thing on videotape.

Welles said in an interview that he didn't know why, but he was always really slow on post-production. He could write a script in a week, but once the thing was shot, it took him forever to edit.